By now most of you have heard of “The Golden Compass.” The commercials have been playing all the time, the billboards are up in all the major cities, and New Line has spent a small fortune promoting the movie in the hopes that they can turn it into another “Lord of the Rings” franchise.

If you’re not familiar with the story, ”The Golden Compass” is the first book in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. It’s a fantasy adventure, set in an alternative world where people's souls manifest themselves as animals, talking bears fight wars, and Gyptians and witches co-exist. At the center of the story is Lyra (played by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards), a 12-year-old girl who starts out trying to rescue a friend who's been kidnapped by a mysterious organization known as the Gobblers - and winds up on an epic quest to save not only her world, but ours as well. The Golden Compass stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott, and features the voices of Ian McKellen, Ian McShane and Kathy Bates. The film is written and directed by Chris Weitz ("About A Boy").

Anyway, a few days ago I was able to interview director Chris Weitz and Sam Elliott. While I already posted the transcript with Sam, now it’s Chris’ turn.

During our roundtable interview we discussed all the challenges of bringing the film to the screen, as well as what he had to cut out and what we can expect on the extended DVD. The interview is great for both fans of the books and people curious about the difficulties in trying to make a special effects extravaganza in the big Hollywood machine.

As always, you can either read the transcript below or download the audio as an MP3 by clicking here.

“The Golden Compass” is playing in theaters everywhere.

Question: You must be bummed that Steven Colbert is off the air right now because you would've gotten so much free press for the bears.

Weitz: I was thinking about that. I was thinking that it was a great opportunity to have Yorick as a wag of the finger or something like that. It's an opportunity missed, yeah.

Question: What first brought you to this and made you want to make it into films?

Weitz: I read the books in 2000. I was working in London on 'About a Boy' and just for pleasure really. It was quite a while before I realized that I was to make a movie out of it. I absolutely fell in love with the books. I just think that they're greatest works of fantasy in the English language actually [laughs]. So the opportunity to turn them into a film is my dream job.

Question: It's been an on again off again journey though, right?

Weitz: It was because there was a point at which I became really terrified by the sheer size of the logistical components and technical components of making the film. When I first got the job Peter Jackson who I hadn't met, but is just a kind of all around good Joe said, 'Come to New Zealand and look at our facilities and meet my co-workers and learn about visual FX.' So I went there for four days and I saw all that stuff and it scared the crap out of me. It was like, 'I have no idea how to do this.' I've now learned enough to really frighten myself because they were deep in the world of doing motion capture for the guys who were running away from Kong and doing computer pre-vis. I had never heard of pre-vis before and then we sat down with Peter and he was looking at a piece of scenery that was going to be in the back of a green screen shot. I didn't understand what the hell he was looking at. I went to New Line and I honest said, 'I don't think that I can do this.' So I stepped down as director and stayed on as the screenwriter, and then in the process of taking what was originally about a hundred and eighty page first draft down to about a hundred and ten page shooting script I started to get a sense of the execution of these FX and these landscapes and gained some confidence in myself.

Question: How quickly did you get your legs when you actually started directing and started to feel confident that you could do it?

Weitz: Pretty quickly once we got under way because the thing is I know a bit more about visual FX, or I know as much as a director really needs to know if they have a great visual FX supervisor, and we did have that. Mike Fink is one of the kind of lynchpins of getting this film done because he has decades of experience and a great aesthetic and if you have the best people it means that nobody is ever saying, 'Actually, you can't look that way because the mountains are going to stop and it's just going to be green – ' or 'You can't sit in that chair because the monkey is supposed to be there.' Instead you're able to say, 'Well, can Nicole [Kidman] do this action that she'd like to do? Will we be able to compensate by having the monkey do whatever it is that the monkey is going to do?' So it comes down to being able to hand over to the visual FX people the live footage that will allow them to render the visual FX in a way that's kind of responsive to the live action rather than the other way around. That means editing things sometimes sooner than you would normally want to, editing scenes together so that they achieve a certain degree of concreteness before the postproduction process. Then the visual FX can be as sympathetic to what you're shooting as possible.

Question: Now Asriel and Coulter aren't really major roles. Why was it important to have such major stars in them?

Weitz: Well, I think that obviously it helps us a lot to have these major stars because our lead is a complete unknown, but frankly it was because we could get them. The reason that we can get them is because of the books and because of Phillip Pullman's achievement. Daniel Craig just loved the books and wanted to be in the film. We're not going to turn that down and Nicole Kidman is just the perfect person to play that character. But also knowing that I'm trying to set the table for the second and third films in which the characters do become more and more important and in this world the characters are very grand figures who will have a huge effect on shaping sort of cosmic history and so having big stars is not an inimical to the whole idea. I think the great thing about Nicole is that although she is a big star she never acted as though she was slumming in a fantasy movie. She really took the character very seriously and as someone who believes that what she's doing is right even when she's acting opposite kind of a green Nerf football representing her demon. I thought that was incredible.

Question: Sam Elliot was talking about some of his scenes that got cut and also I could've sworn I saw footage in the trailer that wasn't in the film.

Weitz: Yes, you did.

Question: What were we missing?

Weitz: In terms of Sam's stuff we're missing a flirtation between him and Eva Green which I took the liberty of writing into the story which I think that Pullman quite liked, but it didn't fit into the kind of hurling forward motion of the narrative. We're missing the footage which covers the last three chapters in the first book which I'm shifting to the beginning of the second movie. The reason for that is that it's got some very dark stuff in it. It's got some stuff that's quite ambiguous and that people who haven't read the books found quite confusing and to me it was more important to sort of build a firm foundation for making films two and three and knowing that I'd have a better chance of getting away with the rather disturbing elements in the end of the first novel at the beginning of a second film as opposed to trying to kind of pretty it up for the end of the first one.

Question: Were you frustrated by the PG-13 rating you got?

Weitz: You mean did I want it to be PG instead? No, I don't think so. There are some elements of battle in the film that had to be portrayed with a certain amount of crunch. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing Pullman's book a service. I think that we always knew that it was going to be PG-13 because there are always going to be people dying. There were always going to be bad guys doing bad things to children and that stuff rightly gets the MPAA concern. So that's okay. I think that parents should always keep an eye out as to what they're children are seeing.

Question: New Line is famous for putting out extended editions of 'Lord of the Rings' because they had a lot of footage. Can we expect an extended version of this when it hits DVD and about how much longer would an extended version be?

Weitz: I really hope an extended version is put out because I'd really love to do a fuller cut of the film. I would imagine – it's interesting. I would like to make the director's version and not the super duper long version which is long for length's sake. So I think that it could probably end up at two and half hours, I would think. So it's not going to be the kitchen sink, but I do think there are areas that could be explored much more fully.

Question: Would you do something special for a Blue Ray or HD version?

Weitz: Well, I've already done this strange version of the director's commentary where there's actually a camera trained on me to do the commentary. I think that's probably scary [laughs]. So there will be a chance of seeing me picture in picture, as if anyone wants to, and at the same time there will be B-roll that you can play while you're watching the scene so that you're looking at the sort of behind the scenes of the scene as it's running.

Question: The running time came out at 114 minutes and you're talking about a two and half hour version of the DVD in an optimistic way. Was there a pressure from the studio to make the movie under two hours or was this the version that you wanted to come out with or was there a negotiation?

Weitz: There's eventually give and take. I don't think that they were especially intent that it come in under two hours, but I always saw it as being around two hours because I think there's sort of inflationary tendency in movies where they're just getting longer and longer and longer, and I'm not sure I always understand why. What the studio wanted, I think, is a movie that moved at a real narrative clip and so did I. There are always sort of debates back and forth between directors and studios as to how long a scene ought to play out and whether a given bit of information is vital to a scene or not. For instance, there's a love story between Eva Green's character and Tom Courtenay's character because Serafina Pekkala is hundred's of years old and the reason that she's helping Lyra which she said is that she was once in love with Farder Coram. It's this really tragic love story, but it wasn't central to the love story and so that's a perfect example that in an ideal world where everybody understood the books the way that I do and love them the way that I do, then that would've been in the theatrical release. But it was inevitable that the viewership of the film, in order for this work, has to be larger than the readership of the books.

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